High Energy Theory Seminar

I'll explain a new way of looking at 4d supergravity --- as a theory of holomorphic maps into Penrose's twistor space. Allowing twistor space to have N fermionic directions, the theory is anomaly free when N=8. Via the Penrose transform, the vertex operators correspond to an N=8 Einstein supergravity multiplet. In the first instance, the model describes SO(8) gauged supergravity in AdS_4. Upon taking the flat space, ungauged limit, the complete classical S-matrix is recovered from worldsheet correlation functions.